CenturyLink's Big Data as a Service will provide data integration and analytics consulting to help business customers deliver use cases for increasing sales, streamlining operations and improving customer engagement.

CenturyLink debuted its Big Data as a Service (BDaaS), a new managed service that bundles network, cloud and application services with Cloudera’s data management and analytics platform.

The new service will provide data integration and analytics consulting to help business customers deliver use cases for increasing sales, streamlining operations and improving customer engagement.

With its BDaaS platform, CenturyLink wants to take away the guesswork for businesses as they leverage and manage their big data, particularly as the Internet of Things (IoT) places more demands on their IT infrastructure. This is the result of not only internal applications a company uses, but also employees using their own wireless devices to interact with other employees and access company data.

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Led by specialized consulting from the company’s team of big data experts, CenturyLink BDaaS delivers a comprehensive managed service backed by infrastructure that can handle data-intensive workloads, including surges. As a result, business can get rapid analysis of large and complex data sets.

Businesses that use CenturyLink’s BDaaS will also get access to Cloudera’s data and advanced analytics consulting services supported by a large set of data scientists and Cloudera Hadoop solution administrators, developers and architects.

Leveraging its array of optical and Ethernet bandwidth capabilities, CenturyLink’s BDaaS provides storage, processing, and management components deployed on CenturyLink Cloud Bare Metal servers. The bare metal private cloud environments, which allow customers to achieve faster time to market, improved data protection and rapid public cloud scalability at a lower cost, have been certified by Cloudera as an architecture that meets its rigorous criteria for ensuring optimal performance and efficiency.

CenturyLink’s BDaaS includes two components:

Quick start program: This will help CenturyLink align its solution to create customized solutions. Based on customer objectives, the service provider will offer specialized workshops that can span anywhere from one day to two weeks. During these sessions, CenturyLink said they can help determine use cases and conduct needs assessments.

Deployment support: Businesses can deploy projects in a proof of concept and then scale into production. CenturyLink engineers will offer assistance building data platforms for identified use cases including areas such as data ingestion, storage, and access methodologies.

CenturyLink’s partnership with Cloudera is one of many efforts the service provider has made to incorporate big data and analytic capabilities into its cloud service portfolio.

Besides establishing partnerships with big data and analytics specialists, the service provider has also been conducting various tuck-in acquisitions of companies that have these capabilities.

One example of this is CenturyLink’s recent acquisition of SEAL Consulting. By acquiring SEAL, CenturyLink gains addition expertise in implementing SAP solutions for customers across manufacturing, retail and consumer products industry verticals.

Earlier, CenturyLink acquired Orchestrate, which enhanced its Cloud platform with a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offering. By incorporating more IT and big data functions into its portfolio, CenturyLink will make itself potentially more attractive to customers that are transitioning into the cloud but need assistance to handle big data analytics.